As part of my never-ending war on clutter, I was about to scrap the 20-odd-year collection of Gourmet magazines in my office closet, but then I heard the news today of its demise, and I’m glad I didn’t. I thumbed through an issue from 1996: It has a dozen-plus page article from Nancy Silverton with exhausting details on making sourdough breads from scratch. Gourmet always pitched its articles and its recipes for the ambitious—it was a point of pride both before and after Ruth Reichl took over the magazine in 1999 and modernized it. While the rest of the food industry seems to be headed toward quickfire, celebrity-driven easy-cooking shows, the soon-to-be-late Gourmet magazine was proud of its wordy approach to food and commitment to thinking about food’s place in politics and society, and yet it was always willing to tell you best way to make a blueberry streusel cake. (Gourmet’s test kitchen is fantastic, and I hope it will survive in some form.)

No matter how evolved I think I can be food-wise, Gourmet could always do me one better—reminding me that there was Basque grilling master whose food I had yet to taste or a brand of argan oil that pantry ached for. It schooled me on down-home American food (with Jane and Michael Sterns' classic roadfood column) and the outer reaches of home entertaining with its lavish pictorial and recipe spreads. Read this essay on wartime Tibet from 1944, or this one from Oaxaca in 1977, and you’ll get a sense of how far-ranging the magazine has always been. Over the years, Gourmet published essays by greats like Samuel Chamberlain, MFK Fisher, James Beard, Joseph Wechsberg (a personal fave), Clementine Paddleford, Elizabeth David, and Madhur Jaffrey. Gourmet was also a trendsetter in the visual representation of food, recently bringing back a sense of longing and narrative to its photo spreads with work by John Kernick and Roland Bello. I’ve never cooked a gourmet menu from start to finish, but a new issue was always a call to arms for me to get back in the kitchen and try something new.

More recently, of course, the magazine devoted more space to simpler recipes, something it did well, but it always seemed to be a little grudgingly ... the photos in their Quick Kitchen sections always looked a little mournful, as if to say “We all have to be practical from time to time, but isn’t it dreary—wouldn’t you rather be eating soup dumplings and dacquoise?” Yes, Gourmet, I would.

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Tags: food, gourmet, media

Amanda, I agree with about 95 percent of your post on vaccines. The “anti-vaxxers” drive me a little nutty, whether the argument is from the left (vaccines are unnatural) or the right (the government can’t make me vaccinate my kids). You don’t want to vaccinate your kids? Great. I hope you like home-schooling. Because I don’t want my children caught up in a measles or whooping cough outbreak because they go to public schools with unvaccinated children.

All that said, I cop to a wee bit of nervousness about the swine flu vaccine. I’m not afraid of “conspiracy theories and government misbehavior” like Rob Stein writes about in the Washington Post. And it’s not about the cost or the time out of my day. I’ve dutifully lined up my three kids for all the vaccines their pediatrician throws at them, and we’ve had almost no side effects. But those vaccines have been used for years. The H1N1 vaccine is new, and trials started in early August, with trials on kids starting a couple of weeks after that. And let’s not forget that in 1976, during an outbreak of the swine flu, one person died from the flu and 25 from complications from the vaccine.

I know, I know. This flu strain is different, and this vaccine is supposed to be better, and early trials showed few side effects. Stein’s article quotes a flu vaccine expert from the Mayo Clinic as saying “People seem to be wired two ways. One group is wired this way: 'If there was something I could have done and didn't do and something happened, I would never forgive myself.' The other group is: 'If I do this and something happens, I'd never forgive myself.' ”

Me, I feel like I’m in both groups, which makes for an impossible decision. Will my kids get the swine flu vaccine? Probably, assuming that my pediatrician thinks it’s safe. Will I personally? I dunno. But I think a lot of people are struggling with the same decision, and it’s not just the fringe.

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Tags: swine flu, swine flu vaccine, vaccination

I recall, a few years ago, wrinkling in a long, cool bath in my parents' home, unable to put down a lyrical ode to lousy English grub, penned by a copy editor at the magazine. It was the sort of essay one could have found in a dusty iteration of The New Yorker, perhaps, but likely nowhere else in the present day but in a magazine edited by a woman who relished writing as much as eating and cooking, and was devoted to both. In the apartment where I grew up, a full quarter of the bookshelf real estate was staunch with hefty navy blue binders, each scrawled with a single word in gilt script, each housing 12 issues of glossy pages too polite to be pornography and too fastidious to be fashion, yet as loaded with fantasy as any magazine I have known. My parents borrowed and gave away novels and history books. In our home, it was Gourmet that flanked the couch, relegated not to the kitchen—oh no—but to the center of our home, the living room.

They would occasionally bake a torte or stuff a chicken from the recipes gathered in the back of each issue, but no more often than from the cookbooks stored in our tiny kitchen. Gourmet occupied a place as cerebral—emotional, even—as it was pragmatic. It was a magazine for thinking about food, as aspirational as Vogue, but without the requirements of an emaciated body, perfect cheekbones, or a Saudi Arabian bank account to render such dreams manifest. Gourmet was pulled off the shelf when trips were planned, when dinner parties were imagined (what they could be as much as what they would be), and when the pleasures of life begged exploring in not just images, but words. This was no equivalent to Architectural Digest, or other paeans to impossible elitehood. Nor was it an inheritor of the housewifely can-do genre. It bridged the place where men were chefs and women got dinner on the table—such distinctions were not part of Gourmet's worldview (and, perhaps because of it, mine neither).

I don't write about food, but I can't parse ideas without chopping vegetables or whisking a marinade. I find recipes on my cookbook shelf, or, mainly these days, on Epicurious.com, and then I dismantle them based on my mood and what happens to be getting impatient in my refrigerator. I never subscribed to Gourmet. Like any revered institution, I thought it would simply survive outside the market forces, ballasted by its own history. I guess I forgot it was a magazine. I would pore over my parents' issues and occasionally pick up a newsstand copy. A couple of years ago, my parents hauled off the nearly four decades worth of navy binders they had gathered to make way for more air and light in the living room. My heart dropped when I learned this. I had always thought of that collection as my inheritance, in some ways. "Where would you put the damn things?" my mother asked. She was right. They look up recipes online these days, as I do, dragging my favorites into a bookmark folder instead of actually bookmarking them. (God forbid anyone rip a page from those binders to jam into a now-antiquated recipe box).

Scanning the list of Conde Nast magazines which have survived the McKinsey deluge today, I begrudge the denizens of so many mastheads nothing. They do their jobs and do them well. People want makeup tips and diet tips and, yes, recipes still, but recipes framed in a way that is merely at their service. I don't want service. I want civilization.

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Tags: conde nast, gourmet, mckinsey, Vogue

Last night on Mad Men, weaselly Pete Campbell had a sexual interlude with Gudrun, the au pair who lives next door*. The German au pair tries to reject him, but by the time he comes to her room in the middle of the night, she is worn down enough to submit to his advances. Was it rape? Or was it consensual? Over on Slate, Patrick Radden Keefe says that this dispute reminds him of the conversations surrounding Roman Polanski of late. Furthermore, Patrick's fellow TV Cubbers are divided on the issue:

Julia, you describe the episode between Pete Campbell and the fräulein from 14C as rape. But John, you didn't refer to it as such in your initial wrap-up. We can all agree that Joan's husband raped her last season—there was no ambiguity there. But the encounter with the au pair was more complicated. Pete manipulated the young woman and weaseled his way into her room. But while she was reluctant to let him in, she did seem, at least to me, to reciprocate Pete's kiss.

My former Jezebel colleague Anna Holmes says it was definitely rape.

I didn't—and still don't—know what to make of Pete's rape of Gertrude the German au pair, other than that it was a profoundly disgusting, and depressing, moment, and yet wholly unsurprising ... Pete's abuses of power—courtesy of his sex, race and station in life—so often take the form of abuses against women—objects that, like the Bonwit Teller dress, can be stained and returned or discarded with little to no repercussions.

The New York Times' Ginia Bellafante comments:

[Pete] is certainly coercive with her, bringing up quid pro quo by odiously pointing out that he went to a lot of trouble to exchange the dress and now deserves something in return. He forces that kiss on her and even though she submits, she may very well be doing so out of fear that Pete will give her secret away and get her fired.

New York's Logan Hill is even less decisive about whether or not Pete raped the au pair:

Pete tries to get the au pair drunk. She refuses, so he himself gets drunk and invites himself into her apartment during the middle of the night. Powerless and coerced, she grudgingly acquiesces to his advances, then spends the next few days crying. (Is it rape? It sure isn’t nice.)

As for me, when I first saw the episode, I must admit that I did not think it was rape. However, upon reading the various recaps and rethinking the series of scripted events, I find myself leaning towards thinking it was rape. Obviously these are fictional characters, but it's only positive that their actions are encouraging further conversation on sexual assault. Emily Bazelon discussed this gray area of non-prosecutable but still deeply troubling coercive sex in her article about the Hofstra date rape that wasn't. As Patrick put it in his Slate recap: "The writers seem to suggest that in 1963 there was a whole range of sexual encounters between men and women that might not have looked like rape as we think of it today (a violent act the victim physically or verbally resists) but that were deeply coercive and traumatic nonetheless."

*Correction, Oct. 5, 2009: the original version of this post said the au pair's name was Gertrude.

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Tags: au pairs, date rape, german au pair, mad men, pete campbell, Rape

On Saturday the New York Daily News ran an e-mail that Robert Halderman, charged with blackmailing David Letterman, wrote to his friends about his agony over his 11-year-old son moving from Connecticut to Colorado with his ex-wife (I can link to this piece, but not the e-mail). It’s a Freudian key into what happened to Halderman, and helps explain how this successful, accomplished person came up with his nutty plan to destroy Letterman. Here was Halderman losing his son, losing his girlfriend, (Letterman’s assistant, who was a former lover of the talk show host), and drowning in debt. So he makes Letterman his nemesis, and projects all his misery and failure onto him. You can imagine Halderman seething alone every night, quietly going crazy, and deciding all his problems are actually Letterman’s fault, that Letterman doesn’t deserve to have everything, when he has nothing. The strange subtext of all this is just how destructive divorce can be. When your family comes apart you can lose your relationship with your kids, your money, and your mind.

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Tags: blackmail, David Letterman, divorce, robert halderman

Sharon, I agree that there is an opportunity cost associated with having children. But just as there is no evidence linking recent female happiness trends to mother-oriented social policy, I know of no good evidence for your claim that social policy is to blame for growing numbers of childless women.

Fertility rates have dropped all over the world in the past 30 years, not just in the United States. The decline is sharpest in developing countries like Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, not generally known for their generous parenting subsidies. Among wealthy countries, the U.S. birth rate is remarkably high, and it remains high even when we remove Hispanic immigrants from the equation. France certainly subsidizes motherhood to a greater extent than does the United States, but French women are not having more children than their American counterparts. What needs explaining is not why there are so many childless women in the United States, but why there are so few.

I wrote a long article on fertility trends last year, and in the course of my research I became wary of politicians who think there is a “right” birthrate to be achieved through domestic policy. American women are not a population of breeders to be incentivized toward motherhood whenever politicians want a few more natives around. The further talk of paid maternity leave can be kept from talk of birthrates, the better.

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Tags: fertility rates, Happiness, parenting

Cookie, the ultimate aspirational parenting magazine, was handed its Fleurville diaper bag and shown the door today by Conde Nast (along with Gourmet and a pair of bridal titles). But along with some pleasant inanity (Tori Spelling, keepin' it real), Cookie was a home for smart writing about parenting (Julia Glass, Deborah Copaken Kogan) that doesn't fit anywhere else.

I've joined some occasional mocking of Cookie, with its glossy pages of "hot mom hair" and 100-plus-dollar dresses for preschoolers. But after Wondertime was shut down last year, Cookie remained as a place for long-form essays focused more on the horror of parenting than on the how-to. Affairs. Favoring one kid over another. Sex. Anger. Volunteering. It was the bad-mom-go-to guide, with just enough celebrity parenting voyeurism to add that key element of guilty pleasure. If Wondertime was, to paraphrase a commenter's farewell to that magazine, the Dansko clog of parenting, Cookie was the Tory Burch flat. Now that they're both gone, I'm feeling like we're left with nothing but our running shoes.

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Tags: media, parenting

I agree with Kerry Howley that no one can definitively pinpoint the cause of the happiness trends at this point (if indeed there’s just one cause). But I think there's more to her incontrovertible point that not all women are mothers. The knowledge that becoming a parent will likely mean being overworked and stressed not only affects women’s lives after they have children; it also influences their very decision about whether to do so. Women who are not mothers could be thus be affected by the same policy lapses as mothers.

The growing numbers of childless women are likely related to the policies (or lack thereof) that make it difficult to parent and work at the same time. Roughly one in five American women between 40 and 44 was childless in 2007, according to census figures—twice the rate recorded 30 years before that. It's hard to know what exactly is behind that decision. Data from the National Center for Health Statistics divides women into the “voluntarily childless” (or childfree, as some prefer) and the nonvoluntarily childless. A woman who wants to have children but is physically incapable would be counted as nonvoluntarily childless. But there's no distinction between a woman who makes the clear choice not to have kids and one who ends up without children less by design than because she can’t find a way to fit them into her life. With good reason, many professional women fear that having a child will mean sacrificing all they’ve achieved in the workplace. Note that the top two reasons women gave for putting off pregnancy, according to a 2005 study published in Fertility and Sterility, were that they were “not financially ready” and “wanted to establish career.” Women who wanted children but couldn't afford to have them, however many of them there are, should not be overlooked.

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Tags: Happiness, parenting

Via the New York Times’ Lede Blog: the only known film footage of Anne Frank. About nine seconds into this silent reel from 1941—four years before she died in Bergen-Belsen—Frank can be seen hanging out a window, watching a passing bride and groom. Who is it that she's calling to inside?

The Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam posted the footage last week; it’s already been viewed nearly 1.7 million times.

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Tags: anne frank, film footage

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with the Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Are your female doctors more empathetic than your male doctors?

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Hanna Rosin: I always imagined I'd have a woman deliver my babies. It seemed like the right place to end what Our Bodies, Ourselves started nearly forty years ago. No more patriarchal doctors! Women helping women! With my first child, I joined a D.C. practice where you see one of several doctors. The men I saw seemed nice enough, but I was waiting for the day I fell on the woman doctor's rotation. Then that day came, and she was an absolute nightmare—insulting, insensitive, unpleasant. The day I went into labor I prayed that she would be playing golf, weeding her garden, killing defenseless insects, or whatever it is mean doctors do on weekends. Luckily, she was not on call.

Dahlia Lithwick: Hanna, like you, I joined one of those group practices for a specific woman OB/GYN. When she left town I inherited a male OB who not only delivered my second son with panache but also slow-walked me through a breast lump scare. On top of all that, he tells me preposterous things every year at my annual exams ("You have the lung capacity of an Olympian," and "You haven't gained a pound this year") that you might expect from Carrie, Charlotte and the rest of Team Sex and the City.

Liza Mundy: I have a female dentist I love. What she does in addition to great dentisting is great chatting. All during the procedure she riffs about her boys, her life, her new dress. It's a deft and (I'm quite sure) deliberate distraction—women's communicative abilities put to therapeutic use.

June Thomas: Amen, Liza. The best dentists are great monologists—after all, during most procedures the patient is in no position to join in the conversation. Since I've spent more hours than most in the dental chair, my dentist ran out of ripped-from-real-life anecdotes long ago, so we settled into a routine in which she'd tell me the plot lines of TV shows or books she's read. She's had tears rolling down my face—from laughter—and there's no way Laura Hillenbrand's book could live up to Dr. Isaacson's version of Seabiscuit. Women aren't traditionally known as raconteurs, but maybe that's because they don't have time to hang about in bars or break rooms. Given a couple of hours and a tricky crown seating, they can spin a yarn with the best of them.

Holly Allen: I love my RE. She helped us have our boys. She comes across as very serious and no-nonsense. One day, she leaned over and I caught a glimpse of something that made me love her forever: Along with her crisp, white doctor’s coat and perfectly pressed business suit, she was wearing cow socks.

Emily Bazelon: In my OB-midwife rotation for my first pregnancy, there were eight women and one man. My labor went on so long that I saw three of them in the hospital. The first two were women. They were patient, if not overly attentive. The male doctor was the one on call for the actual delivery. He yelled at the nurse and barely spoke to me. How I wish one of the midwives had been there instead! For my second pregnancy, I switched to an all-female practice of one doctor and four midwives.

But our most beloved family doctor ever is our sons' pediatrician, Sydney Spiesel, who is also a Slate columnist (no coincidence). We have twisted our health coverage into a pretzel to keep going to him. Gender is just irrelevant to good doctoring.

Tags: female doctors